Landscape at Le Pouldu, by Paul Gauguin (1890)
The weight inches closer and closer, doesn’t it? This week I learned three friends got the virus. I spent time with that New York Times’ series on people we’ve lost. I listened to John Prine and sang his songs. I thought almost constantly about families — thousands and thousands of them — who can’t mourn with loved ones or grieve with rituals we usually lean on. Devastation moved in faster than we knew was possible.
On Sunday, I attended a live class with Pema Chödrön, courtesy of Tricycle Magazine. It was soothing, like a balm. The well of her compassion and loving space she holds left me inspired. Pema’s kindness has a graceful, elegant depth, seeming to float without restraint towards anyone listening.
In her presence, despite decades of practice, there is no question too small, no emotion unimportant. She holds each one, and each person, in reverence. What a world it would be if we learned to offer ourselves, and then each other, this level of care.
Among other things, Pema talked about expanding our capacity to live with the discomfort of uncertainty and unknowns. I’ve worked on that personally for two years, and it’s been hard. A test of everything I want to believe in. But collectively, it feels like something else entirely.
In non-pandemic times, when someone struggles, there are always others who keep things balanced. And that’s still true, to some extent; even today, there are those who offer levity, joy, and helpfulness, looking for opportunities to serve. Yet the weight of so many suffering at once — unique but similar waves of fear, anxiety, sadness, sickness, and loss — feels oppressive, almost threatening.
Our natural response to fear is to contract, closing off and shutting down to protect ourselves. Pema taught that contraction leads to an overly inward focus, a fixation on the self, which only increases suffering. Instead, she says, we can make our response about softening, expanding, and connecting to others, which relieves distress.
So how do we do that as things get hard, and continue to do it as they get harder? How do we honor the preciousness of this situation, however complicated and fragmented it may be?
Among other things, there’s an opportunity to relish unexpected time at home. There’s a need to find joy and abundance in simplicity. There’s a desire to grieve for people who go and support families left behind. There’s fear around financial loss and a collapsing economy. There’s anxiety around the mysteriousness of a post-corona world, and there’s frustration with our system’s brokenness and inequality, highlighted by daily death counts. There’s the impossibility of addressing any of these things in isolation.
By nature, we’re problem solvers. We’ve evolved to assess situations, make sense of them, and offer solutions. That impulse arises now, in our minds, conversations, and especially, all over the internet. But in the midst of a plague, at the hand of acute, collective suffering unlike anything we’ve known, maybe we don’t need to push ourselves to understand everything.
Answers always come in time.
One morning, I found myself with Devotions, the Mary Oliver collection, devouring it like a meal after a long day, pencil in hand, marking phrases emphatically like adults around me growing up did with Bibles. Every line felt relevant. Mary makes sense of stillness and doubt — even death. She calls my attention, again and again, back to the birdsong I relish every day in quarantine.
“You sing, I listen. / Both are necessary if the world is to continue going around,” she says to a goldfinch.
In “Sometimes,” the poem holding Mary’s famed instructions for living, she acknowledges the weight of life and inevitability of death. Before walking wide awake through a field of sunflowers in conclusion, she offers a prayer:
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
It’s difficult to take away our hunger for answers — despite rest and strength, despite prayers like this one — especially when we have so many questions about what life looks like on the other side:
How many people will we have lost?
Will relationships be different?
How much money will we be without?
What will jobs look like?
Will isolation become our new normal, even when it’s safe to gather?
How much quarantine can our mental health sustain?
Will healthcare change after this?
Might our priorities be different?
Our politics? Hopes? Dreams?
It feels important to acknowledge the weight of those questions, the burden of collective uncertainty, but perhaps it’s equally — or more — critical to seek pleasure wherever we can find it, right here and now. In the saplings, blossoming anyway. In the flowers, whose beauty knows nothing of our fear. In the streams, which keep on bubbling, even without us. In the trees, who have seen more than we could ever fathom.
As buds pop open, as flowers and leaves sprout up from the darkness of winter, I can’t help but notice nature going forward, despite life as we know it being brought to its knees. Mother Earth is indifferent to human struggles, however generous she may seem. It’s comforting that her rhythms remain, even after ours are destroyed. How fitting — a reminder that our needs, seemingly so important, are but a flash in the pan of the earth’s story. Our planet has seen pandemics before, and the seasons kept on turning.
In my mind, there’s a way to honor the wholeness of this situation, but it requires more gentleness and bravery than most of us have ever had to muster.
Maybe right now, we don’t need to understand everything, no matter what the internet says. And if the questions won’t stop, we can look at them with a wink and a nod, like yes, hi, I know you’re there, but I’ve put you on a shelf.
The only answer we need right now is care — as Pema’s presence implied — care for ourselves and others, care as we tread softly onward amidst the startling reality that while some of us are safe, others are living a waking nightmare.
Maybe, eventually, when the time comes for answers, we’ll learn they had something to do with facing each piece so directly, so wholeheartedly — each moment, each bout of laughter, each call to a friend, each mask, each time we wash our hands, each and every life, each loss, each ripple of grief — that we open and soften and expand, together, towards something like hope.
Between you and me—
Hugs. That’s all. Plus a song to thank our heroes and a one-minute yard opera; Rebecca Solnit on hope; and Ann Patchett on book stores in lockdown. As always, if you enjoyed this, I’d so appreciate a click of the tiny heart or a forward to a friend. Hugs again. Bye for now.